Selling on the Amazon marketplace is both incredibly easy and very tough. It’s easy because you already have millions of potential customers at your door and have won half the battle with traffic. It’s difficult because on the Amazon marketplace, you can easily get lost in the crowd.
An eCommerce store, however, allow’s you be distinct. You can have a unique personality. On Amazon, your [visible] personality only extends as far as the little 100 pixel wide logo that they allow you on your product listing.
So how do you build customer loyalty to your brand under such tight circumstances? How do you stand out from everyone else?
Build an online presence outside of Amazon, too
Just because most of your sales come from Amazon doesn’t mean you can ignore any other channels. You need to have an external presence on the web, too. Even if you are just starting out. Once you build a presence, you can start funneling people from your Amazon marketplace profile to your website, and vice versa.
Your presence could either be an online store by itself, like Beach Camera, or it can just be a simple WordPress site where you talk about your brand, display your products and service, and most importantly, add value to your niche!
Add value
Adding value is the single most important thing you can do to strengthen your online presence. By adding value, I mean creating content that is useful to people in your line of products. If you sell a particular kind of electronics, it could be reviews, user manuals, how-to’s, or repair guides.
If you sell beauty products, it could be make up tips. If you sell sports equipment, it could be ways to improve your game, or workouts designed for a particular sport. The possibilities are endless!
Foster trust with your audience
The beauty of this method is that it works both ways. When you create valuable content and promote it (yes, you need to promote, too!), people will find your website, and may either buy from you directly, or you can direct them to your Amazon seller page.
If you are sending people to your Amazon page, you may be at a disadvantage if other people are selling the same things for less, seeing as they may end up choosing to buy from the cheapest seller.
This isn’t always the case, though. There are many stores that are well established, have huge customer bases, and sell their products for significantly higher prices than on Amazon – yet still do very well. The key? Trust.
When you give awesome, valuable content away for free, people respect you and trust you. When they see the same branding on the Amazon marketplace (even if it’s just a tiny 100 pixel box), that sense of trust will kick in. So while you may lose some customers to lower prices, you will gain customers because of the trust you fostered. Of course, if you are selling unique products then you don’t need to worry about this quite so much!
The new-age feedback request
Amazon lets you communicate with your buyers post-sale. Now that you have a web presence with valuable content, you can send a really unique post-sale email asking for feedback. From now on, it’s not something boring like “Thank you for shopping with us. We value your business. Please leave us kind feedback!”
Now, your email can look something like this:
“Hello there,
We are thrilled to have had the pleasure of serving you as our customer. We hope you are enjoying [product x], and if you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you!
Did you know that we have curated an extensive resource library to help you better use [product x]? You can find it by searching (sorry about this – Amazon doesn’t like it if we link in our emails) for “product x resource library” on Google – we are usually the first or second result. 🙂
If you really enjoyed our service, please remember to leave us kind feedback. You can do so by going to your Amazon account=>My orders=>click on your order with us=>Leave feedback! We’d really appreciate it – awesome customers like you help us get found by others!
Thank you,
[Your name]”
Much better, right? Because you have created something valuable outside your product, you instantly have a stronger positioning in the market and in the eyes of your customer! Now watch the reviews stream in, and your sales climb!
How do YOU build brand loyalty selling on Amazon? Please let us know in the comments!
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